Police in Fox Lake, Ill., are searching for three suspects after an officer was fatally shot on Tuesday while he was in pursuit of the men for suspicious activity. (Reuters)

A police officer was shot and killed Tuesday north of Chicago, sparking a manhunt that stretched through much of the day and into the evening as local and federal authorities scoured a part of northern Illinois for suspects in the shooting.
Officials identified the slain officer as Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, who they said was known to many as “G.I. Joe.”
Gliniewicz, a police officer in Fox Lake, Ill., had radioed shortly before 8 a.m. that he was on foot chasing three suspicious subjects, Chris Covelli, a Lake County Sheriff’s spokesman said during a morning news conference.
A short time later, after contact with Gliniewicz was lost, another officer found him with a gunshot wound, Covelli said. The three suspects were only described as two white men and a black man.
“Understandably, our officers are having a very difficult day today,” Fox Lake Mayor Donny Schmit said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. “We lost a family member.”
Schmit said that the man known as “G.I. Joe” was a father of four and a decorated police officer.
“The coming days will be even more difficult as we remember him as a police officer, a father and a member of our community,” Schmit said.
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The airspace immediately over the manhunt was shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration at the request of the Fox Lake Police Department, an FAA spokeswoman said. This restriction, which went into effect shortly after 1:30 p.m. local time, says that no flights can operate under 3,000 feet above the ground level where the search is taking place.
Fox Lake, a small village with about 10,000 residents, is a little more than an hour north of downtown Chicago.
“This should never happen,” Thomas Poulos, a retired Waukegan police officer who said he went to high school with Gliniewicz, told the Chicago Tribune. “Joey just loved his job.”
Schmit, the Fox Lake Mayor, said that …Read More